Joining PH after years of work that rarely shows up online - and learning to write about it
Hello from Hanoi 👋
Eighteen years of enterprise software delivery means a long stretch of work that almost never shows up on the public internet. Bank deployments, hospital integrations, factory rollouts. Successful projects get a press release. Difficult ones get a NDA.
Trying to learn the skill of writing about that kind of work in a way that's useful to a builder community without breaking confidentiality or oversimplifying. Harder than expected.
A few questions for people who've made this transition:
→ How do you write about hard-won lessons without turning them into LinkedIn-style platitudes?
→ Where's the line between sharing what worked and over-claiming credit?
→ How do you protect clients while still being specific enough to be useful?
Open to advice - and to other late-career builders learning to write in public for the first time.
Replies
The anonymising is the part that will bite you, and I have it measured almost too neatly.
I have posted forum threads here that were approved and ones that were rejected. The difference was specificity. The approved one named the exact config rule I had written wrong, the dates either side of it, and the counts. The rejected one said two communities I am active in and around fifty comments. Same lesson underneath, same writer, and one of them was never published at all.
So your third question and your first question are the same question. What survives is the mechanism, the number and the date, and none of that has to name a client. Saying the integration broke on a timezone assumption and took 14 days to surface is useful to a stranger and tells them nothing about which hospital it was.
Which of the three is actually blocking you right now?